Heat-Transfer Characteristics of Subsea Pipelines Embedded in Multilayered Soils

Summary A good pipeline design must ensure that the heat loss is small enough for flow assurance despite unfavorable hydrate and wax depositions. The objective of this study is to experimentally verify a formula for the modified overall-heat-transfer coefficient (OHTC) that considers multilayered soil conditions for steady-state subsea pipelines. A laboratory-scale experiment is conducted to simulate the flows of cold seawater and hot crude oil inside the pipes immersed in multilayered soils at nine burial-depth rates. The obtained results are in good agreement with the data obtained by a previously derived OHTC analytical formula.